IBM Lotus Symphony is a discontinued suite of applications for creating, editing, and sharing text, spreadsheet, presentations, and other documents and

browsing Browsing is a kind of orienting strategy. It is supposed to identify something of relevance for the browsing organism. In context of humans, it is a metaphor taken from the animal kingdom. It is used, for example, about people browsing open sh ...

the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...

. It was first distributed as commercial

proprietary software Proprietary software is computer software, software that grants its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner a legal monopoly by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing t ...

, then as

freeware Freeware is software, often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the free ...

, before IBM contributed the suite to the

Apache Software Foundation The Apache Software Foundation ( ; ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open-source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the ...

in 2014 for inclusion in the

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

Apache OpenOffice Apache OpenOffice (AOO) is an open-source software, open-source office suite, office productivity software suite. It is one of the successor projects of OpenOffice.org and the designated successor of IBM Lotus Symphony. It was a close cousin of ...

software suite. First released in 2007, the suite has a name similar to the 1980s DOS Lotus Symphony suite, but the two software suites are otherwise unrelated. The previous Lotus application suite,

Lotus SmartSuite SmartSuite is a discontinued office suite from Lotus Software. The company made versions of its office suite for IBM OS/2 and Microsoft Windows. Status SmartSuite is no longer supported or maintained. SmartSuite used to be in maintenance mode, ...

, is also unrelated. IBM discontinued development of Lotus Symphony in January 2012 with the final release of version 3.0.1, moving future development effort to

, and donating the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

to the Apache Software Foundation.

Features

IBM Lotus Symphony consists of: * IBM Lotus Symphony Documents, a

word processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Early word processors were stand-alone devices dedicated to the function, but current word ...

program * IBM Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets, a

spreadsheet A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in c ...

program * IBM Lotus Symphony Presentations, a presentation program * A Web browser based on

Firefox 3 Mozilla Firefox 3.0 is a version of the Firefox web browser released on June 17, 2008, by the Mozilla Corporation. Firefox 3.0 uses version 1.9 of the Gecko (layout engine), Gecko layout engine for displaying web pages. This version fixes many b ...

Each application is split into tabs. Symphony supports the

OpenDocument The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), also known as OpenDocument, standardized as ISO 26300, is an open file format for word processor, word processing documents, spreadsheets, Presentation program, presentations and ...

formats as well as the binary

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, MS Office, or simply Office, is an office suite and family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. The first version of the Office suite, announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at CO ...

formats. It can also export

Portable Document Format Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating syste ...

(PDF) files and import

Office Open XML Office Open XML (also informally known as OOXML) is a zipped, XML-based file format developed by Microsoft for representing spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. Ecma International standardized the initial version ...

files. Previous support for

formats was disabled in Symphony 3. Symphony is based on

Eclipse An eclipse is an astronomical event which occurs when an astronomical object or spacecraft is temporarily obscured, by passing into the shadow of another body or by having another body pass between it and the viewer. This alignment of three ...

Rich Client Platform from IBM Lotus Expeditor (the shell) and

OpenOffice.org OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed) and Collabora Online, with Apache OpenOffice being considered mostly d ...

3 (the core office-suite code). In 2009, IBM created development tools for

BlackBerry BlackBerry is a discontinued brand of handheld devices and related mobile services, originally developed and maintained by the Canadian company Research In Motion (RIM, later known as BlackBerry Limited) until 2016. The first BlackBerry device ...

smartphones to link to IBM's

business Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or Trade, buying and selling Product (business), products (such as goods and Service (economics), services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for ...

software, which also allow opening ODF file-formats, following a full Symphony later. Lotus Symphony 3.0.1 added enhancements including support for one million spreadsheet rows, bubble charts, and a new design for the home page. On 27 March 2012 a first fixpack update for Lotus Symphony 3.0.1 was released. On 29 November 2012 a second fixpack update for Lotus Symphony 3.0.1 was released.Symphony 3.0.1 FIXPACK 2 is Now AVAILABLE
A web based version of Symphony, called ''LotusLive Symphony'', was launched in 2011.

History

Symphony has its roots in the IBM Workplace Managed Client component of IBM Workplace. In 2006, IBM introduced Workplace Managed Client version 2.6, which included "productivity tools"—a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program—that supported ODF. Workplace used code from OpenOffice.org version 1.1.4, the last version released under the Sun Industry Standards Source License, which allowed for release of binaries of modified versions without releasing changes. Later in 2006, IBM announced that Lotus Notes 8, which already incorporated Workplace technology, would also include the same productivity tools as the Workplace Managed Client. In 2007, IBM released Notes 8, and then released Notes' productivity tools as a standalone application, Symphony, in a beta one month later. The code in Symphony is the same as that for Notes 8's productivity tools. IBM released version 1.0 of Lotus Symphony in May 2008 as a free download, and introduced three minor upgrades through 2008 and 2009. In 2010, IBM released version 3.0. Symphony 3.0 was based on OpenOffice.org 3.0, though not under the LGPL but under a special arrangement between IBM and Sun (who required copyright assignment of all outside OpenOffice.org contributions). and includes enhancements such as new sidebars in its user interface and support for

Visual Basic for Applications Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is an implementation of Microsoft's event-driven programming language Visual Basic 6, Visual Basic 6.0 built into most desktop Microsoft Office applications. Although based on pre-.NET Visual Basic, which is no ...

macros, OpenDocument Format 1.2, and OLE. Symphony 3.0 was originally planned to include other existing OpenOffice.org modules, including an equation editor, database software, and a drawing program. The software was developed by IBM China Development Laboratory, located in

Beijing Beijing, Chinese postal romanization, previously romanized as Peking, is the capital city of China. With more than 22 million residents, it is the world's List of national capitals by population, most populous national capital city as well as ...

, which later for a brief time developed

. On 13 July 2011, IBM announced that it would donate Lotus Symphony to the Apache Foundation.. On 23 January 2012, IBM announced version 3.0.1 would be the last version of Lotus Symphony and their efforts would be going into the Apache OpenOffice project, including the Symphony user interface. IBM planned to release an "Apache OpenOffice IBM Edition" after the release of Apache OpenOffice 4, but later decided that it would offer the stock Apache OpenOffice with IBM extensions. There were complaints that

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

and the Apache Software Foundation did not really provide an open source release of the Lotus Symphony code, although IBM promised to donate the code to Apache. It was reported that some

LibreOffice LibreOffice () is a free and open-source office productivity software suite developed by The Document Foundation (TDF). It was created in 2010 as a fork of OpenOffice.org, itself a successor to StarOffice. The suite includes applications ...

developers wanted to adopt some code parts and bug fixes which IBM already fixed in their OpenOffice fork.

Usage share

During the Lotusphere event in 2009, IBM confirmed its cost-reduction effort using Lotus Symphony, with the company migrating its 400,000 users from Microsoft Office to Lotus Symphony. In June 2008 IBM urged its 20,000 'strong-techies' employees to use Symphony instead of

and later in September 2009 IBM forced all 360,000 employees to use Symphony. In March 2009, a study showed that Lotus Symphony had a 2%

market share Market share is the percentage of the total revenue or sales in a Market (economics), market that a company's business makes up. For example, if there are 50,000 units sold per year in a given industry, a company whose sales were 5,000 of those ...

in the corporate market. , IBM stated that Lotus Symphony had 12 million users with 50 million downloads in January 2011.

Version release dates

;Beta 1 :*Released on 18 September 2007 ;Beta 2 :*Released on 5 November 2007 ;Beta 3 :*Released on 17 December 2007 :*Released in 23 languages on 7 January 2008 ;Beta 4 :*Released on 1 February 2008. Introduced the Lotus Symphony Developer Toolkit. :*Revised edition released on 3 March 2008 ;Version 1.0 :*Released on 30 May 2008 ;Version 1.1 :*Released on 29 August 2008 ;Version 1.2 :*Released on 4 November 2008 :*Revised edition released on 23 February 2009 ;Version 1.3 :*Released on 10 June 2009 :*Revised edition released on 1 September 2009 ;Version 3 Beta :*Released on 4 February 2010 ;Version 3 Beta 2 :*Released on 4 February 2010 :*Features: Visual Basic macros, OLE Objects and embedded audio/video; support for nested tables, presentation masters and DataPilot tables for pivoting on large datasets. ;Version 3 Beta 3 :*Released on 7 June 2010 ;Version 3 Beta 4 :*Released on 26 August 2010 ;Version 3.0 :*Released 21 October 2010 ;Version 3.0 FixPack 1 :*Released 13 January 2011 ;Version 3.0 FixPack 2 :*Released 20 April 2011 ;Version 3.0 FixPack 3 :*Released 20 July 2011 ;Version 3.0.1 :*Released 23 January 2012IBM Lotus Symphony 3.0.1 is now available

, 23 January 2012 ;Version 3.0.1 FixPack 1 :*Released 27 March 2012 ;Version 3.0.1 FixPack 2 :*Released 29 November 2012IBM Lotus Symphony - Buzz: Symphony 3.0.1 FIXPACK 2 is Now AVAILABLE

References

External links